


Stories Told and Untold

by servantofclio



Series: Rory and Simon Trevelyan [7]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, M/M, romance is really a side element
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 06:41:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12293463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/servantofclio/pseuds/servantofclio
Summary: On the trail of Inquisitor Ameridan, Simon Trevelyan considers what stories get told.Ameridan, locked in battle, gets a surprise.





	Stories Told and Untold

**Author's Note:**

> I bought Jaws of Hakkon ages ago, but only played it recently, and ended up with a whole wad of feelings and nothing to do but write some of them out.
> 
> For newcomer to these characters: Simon Trevelyan is Inquisitor; Rory is his twin sibling.

“They might have camped here, too,” Simon said half to himself, surveying their current campsite along the riverbank. It was a flat site, near the water but high enough to avoid flooding, sheltered under the great trees. It might have been here for a hundred years, easily. The bustle of the scouts setting up camp blended in to the ripple of water and the sounds of the forest, birds calling high in the trees.

“Who, Inquisitor Ameridan’s party?” Dorian attempted to brush the dirt off his coat, with a grimace of distaste. “It’s been eight hundred years. Surely the landscape has changed.”

“Let me have this little bit of imagination, then.” Simon leaned back on his elbows, watching the river flow quietly along.

“I thought you weren’t that interested in this ancient history.”

“I wasn’t. I changed my mind.” For once, Rory had been the one more enthusiastic about coming into the field. Simon had been dubious about a hike all the way into the Frostbacks just for some kind of academic relic-hunt. He’d come along because he might as well, and in case of rifts, and to talk to the Avvar if they could.

Rory now sat by the fire, chewing gently on the end of a pen, trying to decide how best to assemble their notes for the day. Simon had moved away to avoid distracting them, and to indulge his own flights of fancy.

“Taken by these tales of your predecessor?” Dorian asked, amused.

Simon shrugged. “I suppose so.” He had a hard time explaining it, even to himself. It had grown on him, bit by bit, as they tracked down scraps of journals, messages scratched into old stone, building up a picture of a traveling party: the dwarven exile, the mage, the templar, the still-mysterious inquisitor. Friends and comrades and lovers, separated, now lost to time. It tore at his heart a little, the possibilities of their own future too close for comfort.

He also wondered more about that inquisitor now. A friend of Emperor Drakon’s, they said. Or at least, a trusted confidant. What had Ameridan thought of it all? Had he wanted the role of inquisitor, or had it pressed upon him? What had he thought, as he sent his lover back to wait, knowing they might not see each other again?

He glanced at Dorian, who was scraping mud off his boots. There were bits of leaf clinging to his hair that he didn’t seem to have noticed yet. Simon looked away, hiding a smile. Behind him, Sera’s and Bull’s voices rose and fell, planning out some ridiculous bit of combat mayhem. Everything felt calm and familiar, no place for thinking about farewells or the close scrapes they’d already had.

Something splashed, in the river. Simon tensed for a moment, half expecting an oversized spider to pop out, but nothing happened. He relaxed as the moment passed, and asked, “What do you suppose they’ll say about us in eight hundred years?”

“Hm.” Dorian gazed up into the canopy of the trees, pondering. “Well, they’d better be sure to remember how handsome and accomplished I am.”

“I’ll be sure to have somebody write that down,” Simon said dryly. “Several times, so no one forgets.”

“Yes, see that you do,” Dorian said.

“Speaking of which, you have something in your hair.”

“What?” Dorian shook his head, rearranging the bits of leaf but not shaking them loose.

Simon laughed. “Here, let me help you with that.”

“No, I’ve got it—”

“You don’t even know where it is!”

Simon reached for Dorian’s hair anyway, and brushed away the leaves once Dorian had subsided. He even stole a kiss for his trouble, if one could be said to steal a thing willingly, if discreetly, granted.

“You know they’ll get everything wrong,” Dorian said as they settled in side by side, closer than they’d been before.

“Mm. I suppose there is a lot to get wrong.” Half of the things they’d seen and done, Simon could hardly believe himself, and he was the one doing them. What could the Kenrics of the future possibly make of it all?

“What do you suppose we’ll find once we get past that wall?”

Simon shrugged. “I’m not sure anything would surprise me at this point.” No cairn, surely, unless the Avvar would have made one for a fallen enemy. Perhaps nothing more than bones. A sad end for a brave soul, no doubt.

Yet he _was_ surprised, in the end, to find a living person, raising pale eyes in a narrow elven face.

#

Ameridan contends, and in contending, forgets to breathe.

The beast is mighty, the Avvar spirit even more so; against them, Ameridan sets, as always, his own will. Power from the Fade, drawn fine like hot wire, chains and leashes, catches the god-dragon in a net of command. The creature roars and pulls against Ameridan’s will.

In struggling, it draws the net tighter around itself.

As they both struggle,

time

stretches.

It could be a handful of heartbeats. Or more. Ameridan loses track. Breath stops. Starts again, when he remembers. The Fade swirls around him, and he catches it, pulling every strand into his net. Somewhere in the distance, he fancies he hears Telana calling, though that could be a trick of some spirit, or his own mind.

Ameridan and the dragon contend, and bind each other into stillness.

More Avvar come, their cries and rituals fraying at the bonds Ameridan has woven. He spins them back, reaching for more of the Fade, alarmed to see how attenuated he himself has become, how the net begins slipping out of his grasp.

There is battle around him, shouts, the clash of metal and whistle of arrows, other people calling fire and lightning out of the Fade, and in the midst of it one bright fierce pulse of power, blazing like the sun. Ameridan reaches for it on instinct — power great enough to tip the balance, to finish this at last —

but finds the power entangled with mortal blood and flesh and bone, and falls back, astonished.

The dragon nearly slips free then, forcing him to focus, to keep it contained.

The sounds of battle fall quiet. The Avvar are gone. The bright spark approaches. With what feels like the effort of years, Ameridan lifts his head.

They are an oddly assorted group: shem men and women, a beardless dwarf, an elf girl with unmarked face, a spirit in the form of a youth, a great horned man.

One steps forward. Ameridan sees how the others’ eyes move toward the two of them, drawn like filings toward a magnet, a look he knows too well.

“Inquisitor,” the man says, with a nod of respect.

The blazing power sounds like a bell, and the Fade sings around it, weaving harmonies that tell Ameridan all he needs to know. He sees it in a flash of recognition, all of it so familiar he could laugh, if he were not so very tired.

Still, his heart rejoices — beats again? — that Drakon’s promised help is here at last.

And he replies, “Inquisitor.”

He hears of Drakon gone, his party fallen, his beloved lost to her own true heart, and his joy freezes, crumbles, sublimes away. Under the net of his will, Hakkon laughs at him.

Yet the dragon has not won.

This Inquisitor comes not alone, companions already scattered and bleeding, but in full strength, with numbers, and carrying that power Ameridan still does not understand, but cannot help respect.

They exchange nods again, eyes meeting, understanding each other.

They look very young, this Inquisitor and his party, or perhaps Ameridan is only now feeling the pinch of each one of those eight hundred years.

He had meant to do more, to rejoin Drakon’s fight against the Blight, but —

— he has held, at least.

Let that be enough.

Perhaps, if Andraste and the Creators have any mercy, there may yet be a reunion.

So he unwinds the bonds he has made, casting the god-dragon into the hands of his successors.

Ameridan releases, and in releasing, ceases to breathe.

#

“I expected to learn about the first Inquisition and its relationship with the Chantry,” Rory said. “But I never expected to find the actual Inquisitor!”

Simon smiled at how much Rory sounded like Kenric, who they’d left sputtering and scribbling frantically in his notebook. No doubt the good professor would have a great deal to write, after all this. “Nor did I. It’s a pity we didn’t have a longer opportunity to talk.”

Rory sighed. “No, indeed. There are so many questions he might have been able to answer...”

Simon’s gaze drifted out over the lake. The ice nest the dragon had built for itself still stood, though the edges were rounded off, gradually melting. He wondered how long it would take for the whole thing to vanish away into the lake, as if it had never been. “Then again... I wouldn’t want to be the one to have to tell him about the Exalted March of the Dales.”

Rory grimaced, eyes going wide. “Er. No.”

Ameridan had missed a lot, much of it dire. Perhaps things would have gone differently, if the Inquisitor and his companions had returned from the Frostbacks in triumph, to build a strong alliance between Orlais and the elves. If Simon had thought about it that way, the Jaws of Hakkon had a lot to answer for.

Then again, perhaps matters wouldn’t have changed so much, in the end. People had been quick enough to forget about Ameridan altogether, along with every other inconvenient bit of the past.

The mark pulsed, a quick ache and flash of green. Simon winced and rubbed his hand, and caught Rory doing the same. “Dorian said they’ll probably get everything wrong about us, too, in eight hundred years.”

“We’ve recorded a great deal,” Rory said. “I would guess we’ve filled volumes of journals and correspondence by now. If that survives, they might get more right than wrong.”

“We haven’t written down everything,” Simon pointed out. Things they said to each other, quicksilver jokes, the look in someone’s eye, kisses exchanged in quiet corners. “Unless Varric has, I suppose.”

“I suppose not.” Rory frowned. “And no one can say what might happen to the records, of course. If there’s another Blight...”

“Maker forfend,” Simon muttered.

“... or they could be lost or destroyed some other way. It’s odd to think about, either way.”

“Do you suppose we might...” Simon said, and stopped, turning the half-formed thought around in his mind.

“Might what?”

He shrugged, feeling awkwardly sentimental. “It’s only a thought. But there’s so little that remembers them, I thought we might... place a stone, or something, in the garden at Skyhold. A memorial.”

“For Inquisitor Ameridan?” Rory’s spectacles glimmered in the light.

“For all of them. Ameridan, and Telana...”

“... and Orinna, and Haron,” Rory finished Simon’s thought, and nodded. “Yes. I think we should.”


End file.
